miniature

Posts taggedwith miniature

Using the nom de guerre Miguel Marquez Outside, Michael Pederson (previously here and here) tucks art installations in unexpected locations around Sydney. The artist’s plaques, signs, and miniature architecture tend to center around ideas of escape, isolation, and our relationship to social norms. But he approaches these heavy subjects with a a sense of humor and brings a lighthearted pseudohistory to various structures and spaces. And if Pederson’sshovel piece, shown below, has you wondering, you can use this site to find out what location is on the opposite side of the world from you. See more of the artist’s work on Instagram.

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Canadian-Trinidadian artist Curtis Talwst Santiago (previously) imbues vintage jewelry boxes with both bucolic moments and scenes of societal disaster in a collection of work titled Infinity Series. For many, the lid of the box serves as a backdrop for the particular environment, while the bottom serves as a stage filled with miniature figurines and elements of water presented as beach scenes and oceanic voyages.

In his work Deluge Santiago displays a cramped boat transporting dozens of refugees, while in another titled Por que?, he presents a scene of police brutality in a purple velvet-lined box. Each of the small works capture a narrative moment of enormous magnitude, encasing the story in a protected vessel meant to be passed on and displayed.

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Tucked under tunnels and nestled in public parks are several miniature doors, tiny installations built with stoops, welcome mats, and even tinier dog doors. The Atlanta-based works are part of artist Karen Anderson’s Tiny Doors ATL, an art project that aims to bring a bit of curiosity and wonder to the city’s inhabitants.

The project began in the summer of 2014, and since its launch has installed 12 six-inch doors throughout Atlanta. To keep with Tiny Doors ATL’s mission of being dedicated to free and accessible art, a digital map found on the project’s website serves as a guide to each door’s location.

For each new door Anderson hosts a miniature ribbon-cutting ceremony, a way to present the work to the public, while also connecting community members and fans of the miniature works. “I love the potential for art to build community,” Anderson told Instagram’s blog. “And I especially love how impactful that art can be when it’s free, public and accessible to everyone.”

To see more images of Tiny Doors ATL’s public installations, and keep up-to-date with upcoming openings, take a look at the group’s Instagram and Facebook. (via Instagram)

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Dutch artist Vera van Wolferen (previously here and here) imagines new designs for homes on-the-go, producing miniature balsa wood models of tiny houses that teeter on the top of sedans or contain wheels to propel themselves on the road. The sculptures, which she refers to as Story Objects, are intended to allude to narratives, and are often built with the addition of cotton to serve as clouds or tiny puffs of chimney smoke. The rest of the miniature house is left as minimal as possible, van Wolferen focusing on the architecture of the object rather than a complicated color scheme.

You can see a 360 degree video for a piece she’s titled Jeep Safari for the Cultural Anthropologist in the video below, and view more of her miniature homes on her Instagram, Facebook and Behance.

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German photographer Frank Kunert builds miniature scenes that at first glance appear like mundane depictions of everyday domestic and urban settings. However after glancing at the photographs longer, one is able to dissect the strange anomalies found in his playgrounds, kitchens, and parks, noticing that his half pipe has the markings of a tennis court and his children’s slide leads straight onto a busy highway.

“On the surface, these photographs confront us with all of the hollow words, catchphrases and banalities we encounter in our daily lives,” says Dr. Christine Donat, who provided the text for Kunert’s online portfolio. “The stereotypical and senseless aspects of human communication cannot be unveiled more convincingly than in their literal conversion into a visual medium.”

The works are a part of Kunert’s series Photographs of Small Worlds, handcrafted models that play with the audience’s perception through the use of darkly satirical twists. Each miniature set is created over the course of several weeks to months, and are not captured until they can perfectly convey the scene without digital assistance.

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Belgian stencil artist Jonathan Pauwels, or “Jaune,” creates urban interventions in his hometown of Brussels, Belgium, stenciling tiny sanitation workers on pipes, door frames, and brick walls. His small-scale installations give a peek into the world of the miniature workers, one where they engage in amusing activities that seem to cause more disorder than good.

“Despite performing an important public service in garish fluorescent clothing, I observed that [sanitation workers] exist in the background of our urban environment, becoming almost invisible to the average person,” says Jaune about the series in an artist statement on his website. “It was in 2011 that I decided to free these characters from their roles by symbolically placing them in ever more absurd and whimsical scenarios in and around the city streets. Those who were supposed to keep the world tidy have become harbingers of chaos.”